Quantum Night (20 page)

I couldn’t shrug lying down, but I lifted my eyebrows. “Classic trait.”

“I—” But she didn’t finish whatever thought she’d started.

“I’m so sorry, honey. But remember, he’s fine, now.”

She rolled on her side, facing away from me; I was afraid she was angry, but then she said, “Hold me.”

I did, nestling into the curve of her back, spooning her tightly. I didn’t know what to say, and so I just held her, and we lay there, waiting for sleep to take us.

A
FTER
Jim had returned to Winnipeg, Kayla decided to come clean with the staff at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care. “And so,” she said, “if there are other patients here who have no consciousness at all, I might be able to help them.”

Nathan Amsterdam, the medical chief of staff, was fifty-something, with blond hair swept back from his forehead, hollow cheeks, and a long, thin face. “It’s incredible,” he said. “But, you know, you really should have told us in advance what you were planning to do. If something had gone wrong . . .”

“He’s my brother; the court gave me power of attorney ages ago.
I
authorized it—and it worked.”

“Still, if it’d had some deleterious effect—”

“It didn’t. It
cured
him.”

He was quiet for a time, then: “Well, what’s done is done.”

“So far,” said Kayla. “But I want to do it again. Is there anyone else here whose condition is similar to what my brother was in? A score of just three on the Glasgow scale? I want to help, if I can.”

“I’d have to check with our legal counsel . . .”

“For pity’s sake, Dr. Amsterdam, you’re not going to bury a miracle in red tape, are you?”

Amsterdam’s office walls were lined with cherry-wood bookcases; he sat behind a matching desk. “Off the record, we have four—no, five—patients with locked-in syndrome, and a dozen or so in minimally conscious states. But with no signs at all of consciousness or awareness?” He frowned, and the concavities of his cheeks deepened. “There’s one. Been in a coma since a car accident, oh, five or six years ago. Her husband is almost as dutiful as you—comes in every other Wednesday night to sit with her.”

“Can you put me in touch with him?”

Amsterdam’s head moved left and right. “No. But I can ask him if he wants to get in touch with you.”

—

I was standing before fifty or so students. My ringer was off; I was famous for chastising students when their phones rang while I was trying to teach. But I did have the phone on the lectern, face-up, so I could keep an eye on the time in a way that was less obvious than looking at my watch. There was no clock at the back of the room although there was one behind me: the students got to see the hour evaporate, but the professor didn’t.

The little tablet vibrated and the display briefly lit up, showing the time—11:14
A.M.
—and the automatic notification I’d set, and forgotten, at the beginning of the trial:
Google Alert—“Devin Becker verdict.”
I violated my own rule, picked up the phone, and looked at my inbox. The headline for the article said:
Savannah Prison ringleader sentenced to death.
The source beneath it was MSNBC.com, although doubtless if I did a search, there’d be dozens of stories already, and hundreds by the end of the day.

And then, I guess, I just stood there, mouth agape, while all those eyes looked at me. I heard someone cough, someone else typing, another person knock a pen to the floor. But I kept staring at the message. I wanted to click through to the report and watch the video, then and there, but—

“Professor Marchuk?” said a woman from near the front of the hall. I blinked, looked up, but said nothing.

“Sir?” said the same person. “Are you okay?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that, and so I just composed myself and pressed on with the lecture. “Watson, you see, was the quintessential behaviorist. He felt that people were simple stimulus-response machines that could be trained any way you wished through reward and punishment. He once said, ‘Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything . . .’”

—

Kayla got a call from the husband of the woman in the coma, and she immediately drove the hour out of the city to his farm. Dale Hawkins was perhaps sixty years old, with a shock of graying hair and a full, matching beard. Although he was wearing a plaid work shirt, he had an intricate tattoo of vines and leaves terminating on the back of his left hand; Kayla assumed it was a full sleeve. On one wall of his living room he had three framed photos of his wife. She had a broad face and brown hair.

“I miss her so much,” Dale said. “I miss her every day.”

“I know,” said Kayla. There was a rough-hewn wooden coffee table between them, but she reached across it and took his hand. “I know exactly what you’re going through. My brother was in a coma, too, and this technique helped him.” She got her tablet and streamed the video Jim had made of Travis waking up. Dale watched, transfixed.

“And your brother, he’s all right in the head?” asked Dale, once the video was over. “He’s the same as before?”

And that was the question she’d been wrestling with. “No,” she said. “Honestly? He’s different. Better, but different. And your wife might come back different, too—and, I have to tell you, not necessarily better.”

They talked some more while Dale looked at the photos of his wife, and Kayla looked at them, too. She had different expressions in each one: a smile, a look of thoughtful contemplation, her features set in determination.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players.
The words Kayla had memorized in high school came back to her.
They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.

“Okay,” Dale said at last. “Let’s give it a try.”

—

I came into my living room—you had to go down a couple of steps to get to it, all Mary Tyler Moore–like—and sat on the couch, facing the TV. I fumbled around looking for the correct one of the four remote controls, activated the set, selected the web browser, went to CBC.ca, and there it was, the second story under “International News.”

“After deliberating for six days,”
said a tall female reporter I’d never seen before,
“the jury in the Devin Becker case handed down a death sentence. Under Georgia law, when a jury unanimously recommends the death penalty, which it did here, the judge has no option but to impose it. Becker sat emotionless in court as the jury forewoman read the verdict . . .”

Soon they were showing footage of the jurors exiting the courthouse. I recognized them, but I’d never heard any of them speak until now. They cut to the heavyset black woman, a bouquet of microphones each sporting a different logo in front of her. She said, “The defense tried to say he had no choice in what he did. Hooey. Guy knew what he was doin’, and he did it. We all answerable to the Lord for our actions.”

It was all there in that woman’s statement—a woman I’d only known as Juror 8, but I’d now seen identified by the text on-screen as Helen Brine. Devin Becker was quite possibly going to die by lethal injection because I’d failed to deliver the goods. The reporter went on:
“Under Georgia law, a verdict of first-degree murder can be found in cases where murder involves torture. The original case against Becker had hinged on the state establishing that his maltreatment of the prisoner before drowning him amounted to torture; clearly, the jurors here bought that argument.”

The newscast automatically moved on to the next story, this one being presented by an anchor I did recognize, Ian Hanomansing.
“Continuing with news from south of the border, in the wake of further deaths in Texas . . .”

I groped for the remote, turned off the set, lay back on the couch, and looked up at the white ceiling, the little spikes of its stippled surface hanging down like ten thousand swords of Damocles.

T
HEY
could have just tried the tuning fork without preamble, but if it didn’t work, Kayla would never know whether the failure was because of some flaw in the device or because Mrs. Hawkins wasn’t actually currently in the classical-physics state, and it seemed best to determine that beforehand rather than try to beg for further cooperation from Dale if she didn’t wake up. Of course, if it turned out she wasn’t currently free of superposition, they’d give the tuning fork a try anyway—what the heck.

And so, just as they’d done with Travis, Mrs. Hawkins was brought via ambulance to the Canadian Light Source, and taken on a gurney down to the SusyQ beamline. Kayla had told her boss Jeff what she was doing, and he was standing at one side, his Hawaiian shirt turquoise and aquamarine today; next to him was Dr. Amsterdam. Dale was on hand, too, and he’d shaved off his facial hair. “I didn’t have the beard when she was awake,” he explained, “and I want her to recognize me immediately.”

Mrs. Hawkins—Jill—looked no older than she had in the smiling photograph at the farmhouse, except that her hair was now completely gray; it might well have been back when that photo had been taken, too, but any dye job had grown out in the interim.

A CLS staffer was recording everything on video as Victoria and one of the ambulance attendants carefully positioned Jill with the crown of her head by the conical beam emitter. Vic didn’t bother to strap Jill’s head in place; she wasn’t moving at all.

As always, the test didn’t take long. Kayla knew it was odd to feel elated that this poor woman was showing absolutely zero consciousness—but, as she looked at the readout on Vic’s monitor, she did feel just that: no superposition; not even that usual background-noise line high up. Mrs. Hawkins was in the classical-physics state.

“Perfect,” said Victoria, grinning.

Vic got the quantum tuning fork out of its foam-lined case. She handed it to Kayla, who held it, the metal shaft cold in her hands. Dale, wearing a nice gray dress shirt, was whispering a prayer as his tattooed hand gripped the back of a chair. Kayla touched the fork’s twin tines to Jill’s forehead and slid the red switch on the handle forward.

Nothing happened. True, even if the fork restored superposition, it didn’t necessarily mean that Jill would actually wake up; she could be blissfully asleep now. But Vic’s monitor showed no change.

Kayla took a deep breath and tried rotating the fork, flipping the tines, just as she’d done with Travis. But it made no difference. The readout still didn’t show any spikes.

Of course, the conditions were different than with Travis; the synchrotron itself and tons of other high-tech equipment were operating here. But Victoria’s colleagues had been using the tuning fork for many days now with substrate blocks adjacent to beamline emitters, and it worked just fine in boosting them into superposition. And, yes, Kayla would go back to the facility with Jill and try again there, just to be sure, but . . .

But she knew in her heart that it wasn’t going to work, and looking over at Dale, this rugged, tattooed farmer now with tears running down his cheeks, she felt awful.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She was sorting through other words she might say, hoping to find ones that could comfort him, such as noting that at least things were no worse than before, but—

But Dale beat her to it, turning to Dr. Amsterdam, and as soon as
he finished speaking, she knew that things were, in fact, much worse. “Until today,” he said, “I always thought she was in there. I always thought she could hear me when I talked. I always thought she’d come back to me someday, but . . .” He gestured at the monitor and its damning flat line. “But she’s gone, isn’t she? Been gone for years.” He wiped his nose with his arm, the shirt’s sleeve pushing up to reveal more ivy. “It’s time to let her go.”

—

I walked out onto my third-floor balcony and looked at the Red River rolling by. Between my building and it was a green strip with a couple of picnic tables. It was dark out, and, as a gibbous moon was rising over the park on the opposite side of the river, I batted away a few of the season’s first mosquitoes—they were coming earlier every year. While I stood there, I saw two people jogging north, and, shortly thereafter, two more running south. P-zeds? Psychopaths? Quicks? Who knew?

I returned to the living room and plunked myself back down on the couch. My walls were a celery shade; that wouldn’t have been my choice, but that’s what they’d been when I moved in. I stared into the soft greenness, thinking . . .

. . . and I must have lost track of time, because I was interrupted by the
bleep-bloop-bleep-bloop
of an incoming Skype call. Kayla was supposed to reach out to me tonight at 10:00 my time, after she’d put Ryan to bed; I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late. I hurried over to my laptop and clicked on the button to answer the call.

She was in her living room, wearing a plain brown top, her red hair tied back. She looked melancholy, and I guess she must have thought I looked the same way, because we both said, “What’s wrong?”

And that, at least, caused each of us to smile, however wanly. “Okay,” I said. “You first.”

She recounted her attempt of this afternoon to revive one of the other patients from the long-term-care facility. I was quiet, listening.

“I don’t get it,” she said at the end, “and neither does Vic. Why did the quantum tuning fork restore my brother’s superposition but not Mrs. Hawkins’s?”

I lifted my shoulders and shifted on the couch, then tilted my laptop’s screen back slightly to reframe myself in the outgoing video. “I don’t know. There’s something different about your brother. Why did I wake up only a few minutes after Menno knocked me into a coma, but your brother stayed in that state for almost twenty years? Sure, each brain is unique, but it would be nice to know why Travis reacted differently from me and differently from this woman.”

“I feel horrible,” said Kayla. “I got her husband’s hopes up. She didn’t respond when we tried again with her back at the facility. Her husband’s going to see his lawyer and get the paperwork done so that they can stop feeding her.”

“Oh,” I said softly, knowing better than to point out that this was indeed the right utilitarian move.

“I mean,” said Kayla, “she’s been gone for years—almost certainly since her accident. But still . . .”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway.” She tilted her head. Behind her, I could see the table and bookcases in her dining room. “How was your day?” she asked.

I thought briefly about what normal couples talked about at the end of the day, and kind of envied it. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but . . .”

“Yes?”

“They handed down the sentence in the Devin Becker case today.”

“Oh! No, I hadn’t heard. And . . . ?”

“They’re sending him to death row.”

“Oh.”

“So I failed to convince the jury that his psychopathy was a mitigating factor.”

“Well, after . . .” She trailed off; she’d been about to say, no doubt, after the district attorney tore me to shreds on the witness stand, it’s no wonder. But it didn’t have to be said in words; her lifted eyebrows were enough.

I nodded. “Yeah. Georgia law has all sorts of provisions for executing people when the victim is a cop or prison guard; nothing in the rules about when the perpetrator is one. But the statute says death can
be imposed in cases where the victim was tortured, and, well, you saw the Savannah Prison videos, I’m sure.”

“Yeah.”

I let out a long, whispery sigh, and pretty much simultaneously she did, too.

“Anyway,” I said. “It’s late—here, at least. And I’ve got a 9:00
A.M.
class.”

“Okay,” said Kayla, looking out at me from my computer’s screen. “Sleep well, baby.”

“You, too,” I said.

But I doubted either of us was going to sleep at all.